The Sky Tonight

A planisphere of opinions. Each list is a constellation and each item a star, the brightest being number one. Only part of the sky is up at any hour; turn the disc to bring the rest over the horizon.

Above the horizon now

Still below it

Designer's note

You cannot see everything at once, and that is the idea. The lists sit on a rotating star disc under a fixed horizon mask, and the disc starts each day where the calendar puts it, so a visitor in October meets different lists from a visitor in March and has to turn the sky to find the rest. A list of three is a small triangle of bright stars; a list of a hundred is a cluster, catalogued by magnitude so the first handful are described in full and the faint ones are set small.

Hardest to build: turning the disc by dragging it with a finger, with a little inertia, while keeping the constellation figures upright and tappable; and deciding star positions by hand so the figures look drawn rather than scattered. Back to the contact sheet.